After spending several weeks in the nation’s capital waiting for a chance to vote on a deal to raise the federal debt ceiling, U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown is glad to be back in Ohio. Brown, the Democrat from Avon, a Cleveland suburb on Lake Erie, was in Cincinnati this week to visit with constituents in this part of the state and meet with the media.

Did you notice how little supposition infected reporting from Norway after the downtown bomb explosion and island massacre? There was no rush to blame Arabs or Muslims nor pogroms against immigrants. There were questions but little blame-casting about police response times to the island.
The man responsible for the bomb and the murders was Norway’s version of Timothy McVeigh, not some dark-skinned foreigner or mixed-race child of an immigrant and Norwegian.

Two Romanian men were arrested today on charges of reprogramming Dunkin’ Donuts gift cards to dispense cash at ATMs. Both suspects were in the country on journalism visas and used the hacked cards to swipe $17,703 from a Chase Bank in Queens, N.Y. The suspects’ haul from the job earned them a slew of charges and two spots on the “100 Top Paid Journalists in America 2011” list.

Let’s connect the dots and see who is being more honest and straightforward in negotiations to raise the federal debt ceiling. (And for readers who think the debt ceiling fight doesn’t affect them, you’re just flat out wrong.) Boehner alleged the House had passed a plan, the “Cut, Cap and Balance Act,” with bipartisan support. That bill — which would cut current spending, cap the amount of future spending, require Congress to pass a balanced budget amendment to the U.S. Constitution and raise the federal debt ceiling — is based on highly questionable numbers.

Barack Obama and John Boehner walk into a bar. The bartender says, “We don’t serve your kind in here … just kidding — what do you assholes want?” This stupid joke is a lot funnier than what actually happened when Obama and Boehner walked into a meeting room in an attempt to avoid a government default, only to walk back out and blame each other for walking away.

Steve Chabot banned cameras from a town hall meeting in Green Township for “security purposes.” Chabot then advised residents to fight a new plan to add public housing units to the neighborhood, though his speech was reportedly cut short when he saw a guy playing “Angry Birds” on a cell phone and thought he was recording a video and laughing.

An acquaintance of mine has gotten into the habit of snapping a photograph with her cellphone while filling up her gas tank. In one instance, it cost her $72.28. She recently urged her online followers to take part in a national Post-It Note campaign at the gas pump. In her words, “Every time I buy gas, I leave a sticky note on the gas pump which says, ‘How’s that Hope & Change working out for you?'

It’s time to take a sober-headed look at which political party epitomizes the relentless pursuit of a legislative agenda that’s out of step with the American mainstream. Throughout the last two years, we’ve heard one Republican after another bash President Obama and then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for supposedly jamming a “radical agenda” down people’s throats.

It shouldn’t come as too much of a shock that — some 140 days or so after he took office — President Obama has acted in a way on two important issues that shakes the confidence placed in him by many supporters. As I told some skeptical Democratic friends during the weeks after the election, Obama might have campaigned as a progressive to shore up support, but he’s really more of a centrist ala Bill Clinton.

As conservatives label Obama a ‘socialist,’ local socialists think ‘the human race can do better’

During the Cold War, there was almost no insult worse for an average American than to be called a communist. Anyone labeled with the tag might lose his or her job, be shunned by neighbors or undergo government surveillance. Now politicians prone to demagogue are turning to a new punching bag: socialism.